Don’t Take Social Media Too Seriously

If you’ve spent any time at all on social media, chances are that you’ve seen corporations’ accounts pretending to be people. Social media has forced brands’ voices to become increasingly personal as the ability to talk back to them has increased. But creating a persona that people can like and trust out of thin air is no easy task, so how can your business go about building a social media brand that really connects with potential consumers?

Many brands strive for “authenticity,” but this may be a mistake. How can a corporate Twitter account, for example, that represents the hundreds or even thousands of employees at that company, ever be an authentic entity? The only truly genuine thing a brand can do is to acknowledge how silly it is to try pass itself off as a real person. If a brand takes itself too seriously on social media, it will be seen as disingenuous. Most brand missteps come from this lack of self-awareness. The best brands on social media don’t pretend to be anything they’re not; instead their managers tend to make it look like their corporate account was hacked by their number one fan. They respond enthusiastically to just about any message. The best corporate social media accounts, in other words, are people pretending to be brands rather than brands pretending to be people.